Faculty Club

The Faculty Club's best-known ghost story centers on Room 219, the old Tower Room, where for years guests and staff have reported a mysterious presence, rumored to be Henry Morse Stephens, the history professor who helped bring the Bancroft Library to UC Berkeley and who lived at the club for more than twenty years until his death on April 16, 1919. Students reported hearing him reciting poetry from his window, and in 1974 a visiting professor, Noriyuki Tokuda, woke to find a very gentlemanly Western man sitting on a chair by the bed peering at him, and was moved out of the room the next day. Stephens, a member of the Earthquake History Committee, had gathered more than 800 first-hand accounts of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, along with newspaper cuttings and photographs; after his death the whole archive disappeared. Some believe it burned in the 1923 Berkeley fire; others think it may still lie forgotten somewhere on campus.